Selling the American Way

U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War

Laura A. Belmonte

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201239
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet called My America. Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society, " the booklet emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention of McCarthyism or the Cold War. Though hyperbolic, My America was, as Laura A. Belmonte shows, merely one of hundreds of pamphlets from this era written and distributed in an organized attempt to forge a collective defense of the "American way of life." Selling the American Way examines the context, content, and reception of U.S. propaganda during the early Cold War. Determined to protect democratic capitalism and undercut communism, U.S. information experts defined the national interest not only in geopolitical, economic, and military terms. Through radio shows, films, and publications, they also propagated a carefully constructed cultural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protecting national security. Not simply a one-way look at propaganda as it is produced, the book is a subtle investigation of how U.S. propaganda was received abroad and at home and how criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations contributed to its modification.

CHAPTER ONE

The Truman Years

AS WORLD WAR II ended, U.S. policymakers relished their nation’s new predominant status. They expected to build a world order based upon the financial, military, and political superiority of the United States and resolved to protect the “American way of life” from the vicissitudes and dangers of the postwar world.¹ Their challenge was to design a security apparatus that protected the nation without making America a garrison state or destroying the country’s unique political culture.²

Reconciling these material and ideological goals proved exceedingly difficult. For years, fascist propagandists had claimed that Americans were weak, lazy, immoral, greedy, and uncultured. Despite U.S. attempts to correct such misinformation, many foreigners remained wary of the United States.³ At home, many U.S. citizens associated propaganda with lies, manipulation, and violations of their civil liberties.⁴ As American-Soviet relations deteriorated, U.S. information officials began describing their program as a defense against communism and thereby gained the fiscal and political support of congressional conservatives. But as the Cold War escalated, information experts, politicians, and private citizens fought bitterly over which values, symbols, and people best exemplified “America.” Before assessing more fully the visions of the nation present in U.S. propaganda, we must first examine how U.S. officials shaped America’s international image, and why propaganda became an important if highly controversial element of U.S. foreign policy during the Truman and Eisenhower eras.

The Postwar Information Program Begins

On August 31, 1945, President Harry S. Truman designated “information activities abroad as an integral part of the conduct of our foreign affairs.” He abolished the Office of War Information (OWI) and placed all information activities of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), under the jurisdiction of the Interim International Information Service (IIIS) in the State Department. The information program, Truman declared, sought to present “a fair and full picture of American life and of the aims and policies of the United States government.”⁵

William B. Benton, newly appointed assistant secretary of state for public affairs, began implementing these two objectives. Benton made a fortune creating radio advertisements for Maxwell House coffee and Pepsodent toothpaste. To the detriment of elevators everywhere, he also founded the Muzak Corporation. After leaving the advertising industry, he served as vice-president of the University of Chicago and chairman of the board of Encyclopedia Britannica. Like most of his cohorts in the government information programs, Benton understood the power of communications and supported an internationalist foreign policy.⁶ Benton, however, lacked experience in the State Department and faced several pressing challenges. Truman’s consolidation order required cutting the staffs of the IIIS and former OWI from more than 11,000 to approximately 3,000 by July 1946. While supervising American “re-education” programs in Germany and Japan as well as U.S. involvement in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), he tried to preserve government relations with private executives in radio, the press, and the film industry. But Benton’s most difficult battle proved to be persuading Congress to support the information program.⁷

On October 16, 1945, Benton testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in behalf of legislation authorizing international information and cultural activities.⁸ Benton explained that the emergence of the United States as a superpower necessitated a postwar information program. “Our military and economic power is so great,” he declared, “that it is bound to lead many people and groups throughout the world to distrust us or fear us or even hate us.” Although Benton conceded that an information program could not entirely prevent others from misperceiving America, he claimed that U.S. officials could try to minimize “the unfair or untruthful impressions of this country” and to ensure that “accurate knowledge counteracts the growth of suspicion and prejudice.” Without mentioning America’s emerging rivalry with the Soviet Union, Benton declared cultural relations a crucial element of U.S. foreign policy.

Benton envisioned an alliance of public and private officials working together to safeguard American commercial and security interests. Cognizant that several politicians believed that federal bureaucracy impinged on free enterprise, Benton insisted that government information policies would not interfere with private industry. “The State Department,” he asserted, “should not attempt to undertake what private press, radio, and motion picture organizations do better, or what our tourists, the salesmen of our commercial companies, our advertisers, our technicians, our book publishers and play producers, and our universities do regularly and well.” Benton celebrated the potential benefits to be accrued by disseminating information about American technology, medicine, and education. Stimulating international interest in U.S. industry, Benton argued, would foster peace by creating global prosperity.⁹

Other policymakers joined Benton in emphasizing the importance of maintaining information activities. Throughout the fall of 1945, W. Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, suggested topics for propaganda programs and pushed successfully for the continued publication of Amerika, the State Department’s Russian language magazine.¹⁰ One of the postwar U.S. information program’s earliest successes, Amerika made an enduring impression on Soviet audiences. Modeled on Life, Amerika contained no advertisements or editorials and was packed with lavish photographs. Soviet readers eagerly (and anxiously) consumed the magazines and passed them on until they disintegrated. U.S. officials estimated that between five and fifty Russians read each copy.¹¹ Typical of the publication’s format, the October 1945 issue featured soaring skyscrapers, gleaming suburban homes, attractive women’s clothes, cargo ships, penicillin, cattle ranches, George Washington Carver, and Arturo Toscanini.¹² Although sales revenues did not cover the costs associated with printing and distributing 10,000 monthly copies, George F. Kennan, U.S. chargé d’affaires in the Soviet Union, deemed Amerika a sound investment for U.S. taxpayers. “A picture spread of an average American school, a small town, or even an average American kitchen dramatizes to Soviet readers . . . that we have . . . a superior standard of living and culture.”¹³ Amerika’s blend of inspirational biographies, technological and scientific prowess, and consumerism became hallmarks of U.S. propaganda during the Cold War (Figure 1).

Figure 1. In publications like Amerika, U.S. information officers carefully selected photographs that highlighted the comforts and achievements of American life. National Archives.

Convinced of the global appeal of the American way of life, U.S. information leaders worked hard to secure backing for their programs. During a December 1945 radio forum on NBC’s University of the Air, Benton, William T. Stone, director of the new Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC), and Loy Henderson, the director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, sought public support for the Bloom bill, the legislation creating a permanent international information service. Sol Bloom (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had introduced a bill to allow the State Department to “carry out its responsibilities in the foreign field” through “public dissemination abroad of information about the United States, its people, and its policies” in addition to existing cultural and educational exchange programs.¹⁴

Benton, Stone, and Henderson possessed a clear vision of the role of propaganda as a tool of foreign policy. Arguing that international information programs provided a relatively inexpensive way to defuse fears of American military power, Benton proclaimed, “A good many people in other countries think of us as the nation with the atom bomb, the B-29 planes, the huge navy and air forces. This impression is liable to give rise to misunderstanding, fear, and hatred if we don’t make our aims clear, and convince people that ours is a peaceful way of life.” Although a propaganda program would not entirely prevent international suspicions and hostilities, Benton asserted, “it one of the cheapest ways I know to guard against friction with other nations.”¹⁵

Henderson added that U.S. information activities would correct foreigners’ stereotypes of American society and culture. He maintained that other nations “knew more about the American gangsters of the 1920s than they knew about the American educational system of the 1940s. They thought we were all very wealthy, and that we got divorces every year or two. Thanks largely to the Axis propagandists, too many of them still think we are a rich, tawdry, gun-toting, jazz-loving, unscrupulous lot.” Despite the pervasiveness of such false impressions, the three officials stressed that American information experts would not resort to lies or distortion in explaining the United States to foreign audiences. “The best propaganda in the world is truth,” Benton asserted.¹⁶

Sterling Fisher, the commentator for the radio program, pushed the trio to define more precisely their conception of “the truth.” When he asked how the State Department would report labor unrest, Stone replied, “We will report major strikes. But we won’t play them up sensationally. We’ll try to tell the whole story—the issues in the strike, what it means to the industry and to the workers.” Moving to a more difficult question, Fisher then inquired whether the information officials would tell the world about a race riot in the United States. “It would be pretty hard for some of our friends—China and the Soviet Union and the Latin Americans—to understand,” Fisher declared. Stone and Benton assured Fisher that the State Department would address “the race problem” forthrightly. Stone claimed, “We won’t hide the fact that we have social problems. But we’ll try to present them in perspective.” Benton interjected, “At the same time, we can describe the progress we are making toward removing the causes of racial conflict. And we can make it very clear that we don’t consider ourselves a master race.”¹⁷

Benton and his colleagues believed that it was unnecessary to hide the unpleasant elements of American society. Throughout the early Cold War, U.S. officials drew a stark distinction between totalitarian “propaganda” characterized by falsehoods and democratic “information” marked by honesty.¹⁸ This tactic enabled American policymakers to present the United States as the world’s exemplar of pluralism, freedom, and truth. While finessing their depiction of some unpleasant “truths” about America, they crafted a national narrative of progress, prosperity, and peace.

But forming a permanent information service in a democratic society presented special problems. State Department officials and their successors at the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) continually found the content and objectives of their programs questioned by Congress, the media, and public interest groups. Many politicians had despised the OWI. While alleging that communist subversives controlled the OWI, conservative members of Congress attacked U.S. propagandists for promoting New Deal statism and liberal internationalism. By 1944, the House Appropriations Committee had reduced funding for OWI’s domestic branch by 40 percent to $5,500,000.¹⁹

In the postwar era, bipartisan conservatives continued to assail information activities as elitist, leftist, and fiscally unsound.²⁰ On February 14, 1946, after ridiculing the State Department as “the lousiest outfit in town” and “a hotbed of reds,” Eugene E. Cox (D-Ga.) and Clarence J. Brown (R-Oh.) led a successful drive in the House Rules Committee against immediate approval of Benton’s programs. “The people of the country are getting a little fed up on this cultural relations stuff,” Brown asserted.²¹ Benton began privately lobbying representatives, especially the powerful Cox, to rescue the legislation authorizing the OIC.²²

While Benton tangled with legislators, the U.S.-Soviet alliance crumbled. Communist propagandists publicized the labor unrest convulsing the United States. At the Council of Foreign Ministers and the United Nations, negotiations on atomic energy, Eastern Europe, and Germany deadlocked. Soviet troops threatened Iranian oil reserves.²³ On January 20, 1946, Harriman appraised the deteriorating situation. He claimed that the average Soviet citizen wanted to understand Americans, but Communist leaders “have consistently sought to present . . . a distorted and unfavorable picture of the USA.” The state-controlled Soviet press and radio, Harriman warned, excluded mention of positive events in America and focused on “strikes, unem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Truman Years
• Chapter Two The Eisenhower Years
• Chapter Three Defining Democracy: Images of the American Political System
• Chapter Four Selling Capitalism: Images of the Economy, Labor, and Consumerism
• Chapter Five “The Red Target Is Your Home”: Images of Gender and the Family
• Chapter Six “A Lynching Should Be Reported Without Comment”: Images of Race Relations
• Conclusion: The Costs and Limits of Selling “America”
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments